Colin Pesyna

Academics

I am a medical student with a strong interest in computer science,
statistics, and applied mathematics. Rather than applying these quantitative
tools to basic research problems, I am excited about their potential to help us
better understand how care is delivered in hospitals and clinics, how patients
relate to their diseases and the healthcare system, and how medical
professionals do their jobs. I maintain a particular interest in organizing and
mining the massive amounts of data produced every day at all levels of the
healthcare system with an eye towards patient safety and quality
improvement.

I am excited to be applying for the match in emergency medicine.

Organizations

Present

Past

Board member, Emergency Medicine Interest Group

Personal Projects

Aggregate Knowledge In order to keep my techy/quantitive side
happy, I worked part time as a computer scientist for Aggregate Knowledge. My role there
was to do proof-of-concept engineering and basic research into potential ways to
solve some of the technical challenges faced by a company handling data
generated on the scale of billions of events per day. I learned a lot, and
developed exactly the sorts of skills that I hope to bring to my medical
research in the future. You can read a little bit about our work on the company blog.

Analyzing the Student Doctor Network (SDN) forums: The SDN is a
"nonprofit educational community for students and doctors spanning all the
health professions." One of the services they provide is a forum where medical
school applicants can discuss the current application cycle in an aggregate or
school-by-school manner. I wrote some code to scrape these forums and
have been playing around with some of the data I've gathered. Once the school
year settles down a little bit, I plan to write up some of this work and post
it here. For now, unfortunately, the undocumented code on github, and this are all that I can
offer you.

Balluminescence:Willy Chyr
and I, along with a few friends built some massive balloon + LED sculptures
which were put on display in the Biological Sciences Learning Center at the
University of Chicago. You can see a write-up of the work here and
pictures of the sculptures on Willy's site. The project was eventually featured
at LabFest! in Millenium Park, but I had moved out of Chicago by that point.